Nothing speaks louder than the truth
by 898700
Summary: She was supposed to be smarter, having been part of the underworld.  She was supposed to trust no one, no matter what; she'd learn to do so in order to survive.  Set in the same AU, and about a year before my story He's so life-like .


Alone in her apartment, only three days into her forced leave, Penelope Garcia tried unsuccessfully to stop blaming herself and her stupid decisions for what had happened.

She was supposed to be smarter, having been part of the underworld. She was supposed to trust no one, no matter what; she'd learn to do so in order to survive. But what, a few years into a cozy, comfortable position into the BAU, and she'd gone soft? _Oh, fuckit_, she thought bitterly. What a laugh The Others would have if they knew what had become of her.

Stupid, she had been so stupid. You shall trust no-one.

No. One.

As if remotely controlled, she turned her attention to the holocubes that littered her living room's corner table. The older ones showed her and her parents, now deceased. She had discovered distrust then, had experienced human deception and learned about human savagery and blood lust. And because of it she had been forced to understand that her father, her mother, had been wrong in placing their trust.

Nobody had had to teach her to hate humans. She had learned on her own.

A few holocubes were black, their content long ago deleted. The friends she made those years, the years she had lost herself into what Reid once jokingly called The Dark Side, much to Morgan's confusion - those friends she had all but banished from her ROM. The alternative had been for the Bureau's technicians to effectively delete the bytes of her memory where the information was stored, and that would have also wiped blank most of the skills they needed from her.

So they had reached an agreement, and she had flushed down every personal file, every video, 3D shot and picture. Now those empty cubes where the only physical remainder she had.

Of what exactly, she didn't know.

The most recent images belonged to her BAU family, her babies. Gideon and Elle in the farthest ones, Rossi and Emily in the most recent; and, in every single one, the four she had known the longest. Hotch, both the youngest among the old crowd and the oldest among the young, never really fitting, not completely. JJ, the deceptively naïve elf-like face hiding the nerves of steel needed to make everyday decisions about who got to be saved first, if ever. Reid, the team's baby by unspoken consensus, at the same time the weakest and strongest among them all.

And Morgan, her joy and rock. Morgan, who couldn't have done a thing to save her, and all because in her own stupidity she had let herself open for the world to see.

But not anymore; she'd learned from her mistakes. She would never allow anybody else to get close without first running a complete search in every single fuckin' system known and unknown.

Her gaze returned to the familiar faces, and she hesitated. It felt like a horrible treason, but at least she knew there would be nothing in the BAU's backgrounds that could be considered a direct risk against her person. Except for Gideon, maybe, as he had worked for the Agency over the years, even when humans were still in charge of the Government.

But despite an embarrassing and publicly known soft spot for the living, Gideon had worked actively to stop the worst of them, those who dared attack the weakest and most innocent within posthuman society. And although he was adamant about remaining inside the limits defined by Law, with time Penelope too had learned to focus her anger against those monsters, although she never could bring herself to completely embrace Gideon's desire to find absolute innocence among them.

Sighing, she left the living room and moved into her playpen, the mock name and the beeps and blinks helping her start to relax. _This_ was her domain, the one place where she was not defenseless, where she wielded enough power to make or end a life, to find the clues that helped her team make their world a better place. Here she was Goddess - _almost_ a goddess, she corrected herself, tipping an imaginary hat in the direction of her Lovelace, Babbage and Turing figurines' collection.

So. Where to start. Alphabetic order would land her first with either Hotchner or Rossi, depending whether she used A to Z or Z to A; and even if she included the BAU's wayward children, it then would be between Gideon and Rossi. Shivering a little, she decided to look some other way. Age landed either Gideon or Rossi in the oldest extreme, funny she didn't already know which one. Reid was the youngest by far.

Model branch was too specific to actually be helpful in making a decision, what with Gideon and Rossi being androids and the rest of the others, she included, cyborgs. Except for Spencer, who besides being a synthbot, was practically a whole species on his own. And Rossi calling himself a biobot whereas Gideon insisted on being referred to as a _robot_ really didn't help. Old guys - they were so prickly.

And boys versus girls didn't even deserve a nanosecond of her attention.

Okay, enough messing around. Fate would have to do. It took her only a moment to find an eight-side dice, but she couldn't get herself to write down the list of names each side would represent. Again, she needed an ordered list. Which, aargh.

Irritably tossing the dice aimlessly, she barely paid attention as it clunked and clanked, landing right in front of a mount of abandoned tarot cards.

Hmm. A signal, perhaps?

The first card she pulled was The Magician. A grin spread slowly in her face. That was easy.

Reid.


End file.
